next time you have a handful of broken blood-blisters, apply
pine-apple juice, and you will give me news of it, and I request a
specimen of your hand of write five minutes after--the historic moment
when I tackled this history. My day so far.

Fanny was to have rested. Blessed Paul began making a duck-house; she
let him be; the duck-house fell down, and she had to set her hand to it.
He was then to make a drinking-place for the pigs; she let him be
again--he made a stair by which the pigs will probably escape this
evening, and she was near weeping. Impossible to blame the indefatigable
fellow; energy is too rare and goodwill too noble a thing to discourage;
but it's trying when she wants a rest. Then she had to cook the dinner;
then, of course--like a fool and a woman--must wait dinner for me, and
make a flurry of herself. Her day so far. _Cetera adhuc desunt._

_Friday_--_I think._--I have been too tired to add to this chronicle,
which will at any rate give you some guess of our employment. All goes
well; the kuikui--(think of this mispronunciation having actually
infected me to the extent of misspelling! tuitui is the word by
rights)--the tuitui is all out of the paddock--a fenced park between the
house and boundary; Peni's men start to-day on the road; the garden is
part burned, part dug; and Henry, at the head of a troop of underpaid
assistants, is hard at work clearing. The part clearing you will see
from the map; from the house run down to the stream side, up the stream
nearly as high as the garden; then back to the star which I have just
added to the map.

My long, silent contests in the forest have had a strange effect on me.
The unconcealed vitality of these vegetables, their exuberant number and
strength, the attempts--I can use no other word--of lianas to enwrap and
capture the intruder, the awful silence, the knowledge that all my
efforts are only like the performance of an actor, the thing of a
moment, and the wood will silently and swiftly heal them up with fresh
effervescence; the cunning sense of the tuitui, suffering itself to be
touched with wind-swayed grasses and not minding--but let the grass be
moved by a man, and it shuts up; the whole silent battle, murder, and
slow death of the contending forest; weigh upon the imagination. My poem
_The Woodman_ stands; but I have taken refuge in a new story, which just
shot through me like a bullet in one of my moments of awe, alone in that
tragic jungle:--